Paradoxically, the people who are now drawn to Space Age Bachelor Pad music are the same people who prize the lurid 1950's pulp paperbacks and men's pinup magazines.
But for the younger jazz hipsters and rock-and-rollers who came of age in the 1960's, it was Daddy-O music, reviled as emblematic of conformist middle-class values. For those who came of age in the Cold War, Atomic Age 1950's, easy-listening music provided a means of escape from the tensions of the day while offering the fantasy of a sophisticated lifestyle: the image of the cigarette-smoking, cocktail-drinking, swinger-about-town that reached its apogee with the Rat Pack and Las Vegas lounge music. "A lot of the percussion and sound effects sound like a bartender mixing drinks, the clink of ice cubes, the popping of Champagne corks."Īt the time it was made, such music was a point of generational contention. Martin's Press, 1994), explores the social history of easy-listening mood music. "It's meant to be unobtrusive," said Joseph Lanza, whose book, "Elevator Music," (St.
"It was almost effects set to music," said Paul Williams, a vice president of strategic marketing at RCA.Īs easy as the music is to put down, it is not without its esthetic defenders. Some of it was originally conceived for the purpose of demonstrating the capabilities of the new stereo technology of the late 50's and early 60's. Space Age Bachelor Pad was once as unhip as you could get. Naturally, a World Wide Web site is devoted to the genre (), and there are zines, like Lounge Magazine, Bachelor No. Phat's Royal Martini in Los Angeles and Tynynyny in New York are attracting young would-be sophisticates. Young hipster bands like Combustible Edison, whose 1994 album was called "I, Swinger," are playing their own updated mood music, while clubs like Mr. Space Age Bachelor Pad music is not solely the province of the aged and dead. In 1995, RCA issued a three-volume compilation, "History of Space Age Pop." In early 1996 Rhino Records will release a three-disk compilation, "Cocktail Mix." Rykodisc is planning its compilation, "Shaken, Not Stirred," and Capitol has plans for a set of five compact disks called "Ultra-Lounge."
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The term itself, a recent coinage sometimes shortened to Space Age Pop, Lounge or Cocktail, includes music from the Polynesian tiki-tiki of Les Baxter and Martin Denny to the staccato, almost post-modern orchestrations of Juan Garcia Esquivel to what has been termed "Wife Swapper Jazz," with arrangements by Neil Hefti, Les Elgart and Quincy Jones, to "Crime Jazz," the television and movie music composed by people like Elmer Bernstein and Henry Mancini. Space Age Bachelor Pad Music dates from the early 1950's to the mid-1960's, when easy-listening, largely instrumental mood music provided a melodious adult counterpoint to the youthful eruption of rock-and-roll. You mean you haven't been waiting for this? Now, near the top of the revival agenda for 1996 is an unlikely genre, Space Age Bachelor Pad Music. FROM their rediscovery of "Moby Dick" in the 1920's to their fondness for endless reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show, Americans have habitually mined the slag heap of discarded popular cultural artifacts.
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